Oatmeal in the Arena

This morning I read the Introduction and Foreward to The Arena while choking down a little too much oatmeal. It's a book that gets talked about a lot (and even read!) in some Orthodox circles, especially during Great Lent, but I've never read it entirely. Since we have just begun the Nativity Fast, I thought I'd try and make this book my companion until the Feast of the Nativity of Christ (Christmas).

The last thing in the world I was looking for this morning was a raison d'être for my blog. I often question whether or not God is pleased with my blog. . .especially when I get laudatory comments. When I read a comment from someone who has found my blog entries useful or even helpful, instead of just simply thanking God, I find myself caught up in an internal dialogue peppered with lots of Uriah Heepish "We are so very ‘umble. . ." slobberings. The ensuing nausea always makes me stay away from my computer for a while. So, anyway, I was surprised (and relieved) that perhaps there is some redeemable aspect to posting my scattered reflections about the various struggles I encounter in my particular journey. Perhaps I'm not as guilty of exhibitionism as I think...

St. John of the Ladder says that certain people who had passed through swampy places got stuck in the mud. But while still covered with filth they told others who passed that way of how they had sunk there, doing this for their salvation. And the Almighty delivered from the swamp or slough of despondency those who, for the salvation of their neighbors, warned them against falling into it.

Of course, St. Ignatius Brianchaninov wrote this to set the context for his offering of The Arena. Obviously, I'm not suggesting that my Cracked Mirror is on the same level, but I do hope I can offer it in the same spirit. Maybe if St. Ignatius would pray from me, I could do this a little better.

Hell

The Orthodox understanding of Hell has been enlightening to me. Simply put (perhaps too simply) - the Orthodox Church teaches us that hell is not separation from God in the usual sense. That is, hell is not a place where God sends all the wicked folks in order to punish them and/or get them out of the way. It is not some sort of cosmic torture chamber where the wrath of God is poured out mercilessly on hapless sinners. Rather, the Orthodox Church teaches that Hell is made hellish precisely because those who hate God cannot escape from His all-pervasive love. It is the torment inflicted by trying to escape from the inescapable love of God. Basically. . .Hell is a "relationship thing". God is sweet light to those who love Him, and a consuming fire to those who hate Him.

I don't bring this up to discuss the "theology of Hell" in an abstract way. That sort of thing doesn't interest me. What does interest me are the ways I have encountered something akin to the Orthodox understanding of Hell in human-to-human relationships. I'll give a couple of examples.

Have you ever loved someone who didn't respond in kind? More to the point. . .have you ever been on the receiving end of such affection but didn't want it? I only experienced that in a sort of absolute way, once, as a teenager. A girl I knew really wanted to be my girlfriend, and I couldn't stand her. It was awful. I got to the point where I became almost physically ill every time she spoke to me or even looked at me.

Unfortunately, even when we sincerely love someone. . .such as our spouse. . .our hearts are not always able to receive their love. Our hearts are prone to hardness and coldness. . .at least mine is. What I've noticed in my marriage with Macrina for example, is that sometimes my heart closes before I'm aware of it. I'm beginning to recognize the symptoms of a closed heart: irritability, sullenness, and an obsessive internal dialogue that isolates me from my environment. Once "there", I'm incapable of receiving love and her movement towards me scares me and I "run" in one way or another. It is truly a torment until my heart warms and opens again. . .usually involving repentance towards God.

I never used to think of Hell much. . .it just seemed so remote. Plus, I don't think I could ever envision God as a sadist. So Hell never scared me much. However, the Orthodox understanding of Hell does frighten me. . .to my bones. I've experienced it in small degrees and am familiar with the burns it inflicts. The most frightening thing is my tendency to close my heart to those who love me. . .including first and foremost, God. The struggle of struggles, it seems to me, is to remain open-hearted (trusting and loving) towards God despite our inclination to run and hide like Adam and Eve. The alternative is Hell.

The Way of Salvation

When I began exploring Orthodoxy, Fr. Nicholas encouraged me to start saying the Jesus Prayer ("Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me") over and over, as much as I could. I struggled with this at first because it seemed like "vain repetition". At the time, my life was pretty broken because of the failure of my marriage. . .so I didn't complain. He also encouraged me to embrace other ascetic labors such as standing in long Church services, fasting, etc. Again, I didn't complain, I eagerly obeyed, according to my strength, all that he was guiding me towards. That's just another way of saying that the failure of my marriage had humbled me, and I was willing to listen to someone who had experience that I didn't. But the inevitable happened. The very healing I received from Christ, through these ascetic labors, afforded me the strength to start "questioning things." In a certain way, that is the beginning of the battle of a convert to Orthodoxy. I've won some, and I've lost some of these battles. My spiritual health, like my physical health, oscillates a bit. But I certainly don't think my experience is unique at all.

One of the principle characteristics of spiritual "illness" that I have noticed in this continuing struggle, is a lack of being "present". That is, my level of distractedness is much greater during times when I have the spiritual "flu". I read something in the latest copy of Divine Ascent that sheds a little light on this in an article by Archimandrite Meletios Webber titled, "The Mind, the Heart and the Way of Salvation". Here's a brief quote:

When the mind (as opposed to the heart) looks at the present moment, it sees nothing, or at least nothing worth considering. The mind is much happier working in the past or future, since they are both actually constructs of the mind's own workings, and so the mind feels it can control them. The present moment, however, is completely outside its control, and therefore ignored.

The entire article, which I recommend, is about the difference between the mind and the heart. . .a concept that may seem trivial to anyone who has not been exposed to the teachings of the ancient Church Fathers. In the West the mind has dominated for such a long time, that the idea of the "heart", or more correctly, "the nous" as being the true center of our being, is hardly known. At least that's my experience.

After reading this, I saw something new about the "Jesus Prayer". I can understand why it is called the "prayer of the heart". It is a prayer in the present tense, and as such is not very appealing to the mind. But when the mind calms down a bit, the heart is strengthened by this prayer. I have only just gotten a whiff of it. . .but enough of a whiff to understand something of what a true ascetic experiences when he or she causes their mind to "descend into their heart". They are strengthened in holiness, simplicity. That is, their personalities are re-integrated (healed) from the shattering that took place as a result of the primordial fall. It is the way of salvation.

Asceticism and Body Piercing

I was talking with Germanus at our agape feast after church this morning and we somehow got onto the subject of work. He started describing some of the jobs he's held over the years, and it turns out he used to be a body-piercer. I've never been part of that subculture, so I'm always fascinated to talk to someone who was. He told me a pretty funny, and probably typical, story of some macho Marine coming in half drunk with his buddies egging him on, to get his nipples pierced. He was talking big. . .but it hurt like hell. . .and he passed out. I asked Germanus if going through the pain of a tattoo or piercing was part of the "rite", and he agreed that it was. His comments interested me and as we talked we found ourselves slowly entering a conversation about Christian asceticism.

According to Germanus, allowing yourself to be hurt willingly, by submitting to a piercing, is a way of finding out whether or not you are capable of a little more than you thought you were. He seemed to think it made a lot of sense in tribal cultures since deprivation and pain is such an integral part of their lives. Therefore, knowing one's limits is a good thing. So, being initiated into adulthood via a rite of passage that involves voluntary submission to pain is a ritual way of teaching the youth they are capable of more than they think. I would've liked to continue the discussion about why tats and piercings are so important to many people in a culture which otherwise seems obsessed with the denial and obliteration of anything painful. (Perhaps it's a reaction to the vacuousness of that obsession?) But instead, we started talking about the ascetic life of Eastern Orthodoxy and how that fasting, keeping vigil, giving alms, keeping the commandments, etc., is the Church's way of teaching people the very same lesson: We are capable of more than we think. But it doesn't end there. The other thing that asceticism assumes is that this life is temporal, while God's kingdom is eternal. In fact, the importance of the ascetic life seems inestimable in the life of the Church. Without it, Christianity is about as real as a video game. Great graphics, soundtrack, and story line. . .but a nagging emptiness that lingers when the power goes down.

A Place for Linda Marie Steele Tate

About a month ago I posted the sad news that my friend Duane's wife (Lin) had died in a tragic accident and had given a link to the Strawmen Vault where you could hear/download a song Duane had written for her (Masquerade). It turns out that since Google owns Blogspot, these blog posts get indexed well by Google. So, a few of Lin's and Duane's friends found the Strawmen website via Google searches for Lin. I got an email from one of those folks, asking me to pass on condolences to Duane and the thought occurred to me to simply create a forum on the Strawmen's discussion board, The StrawBoard, so folks could leave messages of their own. So that's what I did. Click on the StrawBoard link, and you'll be taken there. You'll see a forum titled "In Memory of Linda Marie Steele Tate". If you are so moved, please leave words of encouragement, prayers, condolences, and expressions of sympathy.

I'm fighting fire with fire in doing this. Because the anonymity of the internet seems to bring the worst out in people, Duane has had the misfortune of reading some truly horific things about his dear wife's tragic death. He sent me a link, which I will not reveal, that made me sick. It would be nice if we could extinguish that darkness with a little light. Thanks for considering leaving a few "flowers", even if you didn't know Lin or Duane.

Light, Fire, and Focus

When I first started this blog, it was largely the result of the Strawmen releasing Saving Faded Dreams and putting together a website to promote the CD since we don't tour. I'm glad all that happened, but it is really a miniscule, and largely historical part of my life. I'm just not all that interested in that stuff anymore. What interests me most these days is the struggle my wife and I have in attempting to live an authentic Christian life in as traditional an Orthodox manner as is possible. That is, living in a community that pays more attention to the cycle of Church services, feast-days, fast-days, etc. than it does to our cultural holidays, paydays, and political cycles. More and more I've come to regard the gigantic teat of our culture (greed disguised as economics, lust masquerading as freedom, pride pretending to be self-esteem, etc.) as a fountain of misery. I find the traditional life of Orthodoxy that we attempt to live out on Overton St. in Portland refreshing and hopeful. . .but a helluva struggle because there is nothing in the wider culture that supports it. That's OK. It's a small sacrifice. I've always leaned toward counterculture activities anyway, and traditional Orthodoxy offers me all the counter-ness I can stand.

So, I'm going be focusing my blog more and more on these types of "scattered reflections", and have modified the subtitle of my blog to capture this. For any of you that have read some of my entries, you know that I've already been headed in this direction. I suppose this entry is more for myself, because I regularly get drawn to this and that and easily lose my focus. But again and again, I find myself being drawn to the light of Orthodoxy and its traditional way of life like a moth to the flame. I want to be burned up in that light.

Matrix TV

Yesterday, while unpacking bags from our trip, I watched both John Kerry's and President Bush's post-election speeches. I was moved by both men. John Kerry was classy and President Bush humble. They both communicated something far more noble in those speeches than in any speech, debate, or TV ad I witnessed during the campaign. It made me wonder why neither of them could pull off being more human during the campaign.

There is something about a political campaign that pulls the sheets back on the abysmal state of public discourse in this country. It's about as compelling to me as watching dust settle. But we appear to be trapped in it. We seem to need everything to be a spectacle. I read Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves To Death years ago, and I remember his observations re: the effect TV has had on public discourse were compelling to me. Over the years, I've managed to reduce TV's place in my life, but it still gets too much of my attention. I'm going to re-read Postman's book, and ask my wife to do the same. Maybe together, and with God's help, we can figure out a way to dislodge ourselves completely from "The Matrix". Here's a quote from Chapter 5, for those of you who've never read it:

Television has become, so to speak, the background radiation of the social and intellectual universe, the all-but-imperceptible residue of the electronic big bang of a century past, so familiar and so thoroughly integrated with American culture that we no longer hear its faint hissing in the background or see the flickering grey light. This, in turn, means that its epistemology goes largely unnoticed. And the peek-a-boo world it has constructed around us no longer seems even strange.

There is no more disturbing consequence of the electronic and graphic revolution than this: that the world as given to us through television seems natural, not bizarre. For the loss of the sense of the strange is a sign of adjustment, and the extent to which we have adjusted is a measure of the extent to which we have changed. Our culture's adjustment to the epistemology of television is by now almost complete; we have so thoroughly accepted its definitions of truth, knowledge and reality that irrelevance seems to us to be filled with import, and incoherence seems eminently sane.

It is my object in the rest of this book to make the epistemology of television visible again. I will try to demonstrate by concrete example ... that television's conversations promote incoherence and triviality ... and that television speaks in only one persistent voice — the voice of entertainment. Beyond that, I will try to demonstrate that to enter the great television conversation, one American cultural institution after another is learning to speak its terms. Television, in other words, is transforming our culture into one vast arena for show business. It is entirely possible, of course, that in the end we shall find that delightful, and decide we like it just fine. This is exactly what Aldous Huxley feared was coming, fifty years ago.

Back to Work

It's been a good vacation, except for the ghosts I've encountered while visiting family in Virginia and Florida. For some reason, old behaviors surface more easily when visiting the places you grew up. And some of those old ghosts are scary, so I find myself hiding behind what I believe, rather than being what I believe. That is, I find myself excusing certain behaviors because I think my faith overshadows my actions. I know it's silly, and I can quote from the book of James and 1st John too, in case you're tempted. My ex-wife brought this to my attention in a startling way when I was a student at Covenant Theological Seminary about 13 years ago. She said, "You go to class all day, studying the Bible, learning theology, learning Greek. . .and you're still the same miserable person you've always been." Ouch. . .she was dead right. . .and God bless her, because that comment is one of the treasures (in addition to my two children and certain other things) that marriage produced. I wasn't able to change much right away (knowledge alone isn't all that helpful), which is one reason she eventually became my ex-wife.

I'm still not doing all that good, at least from my point of view. . .only God knows the reality. . .and I get discouraged. I'm noticing it especially while visiting family on vacation. My prayer life has suffered disruption (nobody's fault but mine, to quote Blind Willie Johnson) and that has a profound effect. The most noticeable thing (to me and especially to my wife) is my lack of humility which manifests itself like an appalling imitation of the Bill O'Reilly show. Yuk!! I'm ready to go home. I'm ready (I hope) for confession. I'm ready to make myself get up in the morning and commemorate the saints and pray with my community. It's been a good vacation, even though I've seen parts of myself that I thought had died. Time to get back to work.